August’s Locarno Film Festival will go British with its latest retrospective: Great Expectations: British Post-War Cinema, 1945-1960.
The retrospective forms a major strand of the film festival’s programming and for many festival goers is a standout and popular attraction. Boasting fresh restorations and rare screenings of difficult to get prints, past seasons have been devoted to filmmakers such as Douglas Sirk or studios such as last year’s retrospective, The Lady with the Torch, which celebrated the centenary of Columbia Pictures.
Great Expectations: British Post-War Cinema, 1945-1960 is organized by the LOcarno Film Festival in partnership with the BFI National Archive and the Cinémathèque Suisse, with the support of Studiocanal. The film curator responsible for the last program, Ehsan Khoshbakht, returns this year with Great Expectations. He spoke exclusively with Variety about the lineup and the rules dictating his selection.
What are the criteria for selection?
I chose a) films set only in Britain, which excludes films like “The Third Man;” b) no fantastical premises, so no horror or fantasy films; c) only contemporary films, no period pieces, no films about the World War II. And finally, d) no kitchen sink, British New Wave films. With those filters in place, what do you get? You get a retrospective about the British character, about people of the islands between 1945 and 1960.”
What is the state of British cinema in the aftermath of the war?
“A Diary for Timothy” by Humphrey Jennings is a 1945 documentary which asks a very simple question. What’s next? What are we going to do now? The entire retrospective is an answer to that question. I follow the story of Timothy, an imaginary story that I tell through 45 films. Without showing the War, war is behind every frame of the films: the discussions between characters, rationing, the black market and the bomb sites. How are we going to rebuild these cities? Muriel Box answers that question in “The Happy Family,” which is about the renovation and replanning of the South Bank right before the Festival of Britain.
Does not having fantastical elements mean we’re going to get a lot of social realism?
Absolutely not. Far from it. These films are highly stylized, showing the glory of the British studio system and genre filmmaking. “The Happy Family” is a comedy. There are many crime thrillers, like Basil Dearden’s “Pool of London” and “The Clouded Yellow” by Ralph Thomas, father of the famous British producer Jeremy Thomas. We have Hammer before it turned to horror with “Whispering Smith Hits London,” by Francis Searle, which will be the world premiere of the 4K restoration.
How did you choose what to include?
I did some rationing. Let’s give them one third major classics, like “Passport to Pimlico,” another third, lesser-known films by well-known directors so we have an Alexander McKendrick film, “Mandy,” from 1953 about a little deaf girl. And one third British B movies: humble, small, well-crafted British films.
Children seem to pop up throughout this program.
Yes, also in the film “Hunted,” by Charles Crichton. This is a very important film for me, because it won the Best Film Award at Locarno in 1953. Again, it is another Timothy, another Mandy, raised among the ruins of the postwar. Likewise, “I Know Where I’m Going” by Powell and Pressburger opens with a shot of that small girl, crawling on the floor. She knows where she’s going. Again, this is sort of a variation on the question of that child, Timothy, and reveals another theme of the program: the north-south axis, and the journeys between the two that mostly are undertaken by children. They are all searching for a better world.
Not all these filmmakers are British.
One of the great paradoxes of this period is that, from the outside, British cinema doesn’t look very open. But there’s an ongoing migration of great talents, first from Central and Eastern Europe to Britain, and then even from America, from Hollywood to this country because of the Blacklist: Joseph Losey, Jules Dassin, and Cy Endfield. We’re showing Edward Dmytryk’s “Obsession.”
Obsession
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What made you choose the infamous “Peeping Tom” as your closing film?
“Peeping Tom” bore the extremely violent reaction by British critics and typical to the majority of these films. There was a dismissal of studio filmmaking under the banner of good taste. This is something troublingly British. It does not exist in any other country. What’s good taste? You go through all these publications, and it’s always about, “oh, this film is done in poor taste.” “Peeping Tom” is also about cinema and represents the end of many different things in British cinema. Michael Powell going it alone marks the end of a certain type of collaboration we have seen everywhere in this program: the Bolton brothers, Launder and Gilliat, and the Boxs.
Last year’s retrospective involved Columbia Pictures and so you had a powerful partner. How about this time around?
I’m doing this in collaboration with the BFI. The majority of the prints are going to be provided by the BFI National Archive prints. The BFI have helped enormously and specifically James Bell and Josephine Botting. There’s going to be a book with a collection of essays, all newly commissioned, some of the finest writers, illustrated with stills and photographs from the collection of the BFI as well.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Switzerland’s Locarno Film Festival takes place over Aug. 6-16.
